Garden Pairs – Patchwork Challenge 2014

Last weekends wall to wall sunshine capped off a perfect week weather wise and it wont come as any surprise to hear that we were out and about making the most of things. As ever options were numerous but a certain Cuckoo out west seemed like the ideal excuse to head over to Pembrokeshire for the first time in several months. What followed was certainly a very enjoyable day but judging from twitter I must be one of the few people out of hundreds who managed to dip. Stupid golf course. Inevitably a full trip report is on its way, once I’ve finished cursing the birding gods of course, but in this post I’d like to focus on activity closer to home where Sunday saw us completing major construction on our new wildlife pond. The added bonus of this was that we got to spend a lot of time enjoying the comings and goings of our resident birds and it’s clear that they’ve wasted no time in pairing up for this years breeding season. Both of the Dunnocks are sticking closely together suggesting a nest nearby and our usually boisterous Robin seems to have been tamed by the fairer sex. Meanwhile a couple of Blue Tits are investigating one of the nest boxes (fingers crossed for our first success this year), the Chaffinches have rediscovered their voices and best of all we’ve got a couple of these little beauties popping in and out of the garden at regular intervals.

Remarkably this Long-tailed Tit turned up on the fatball feeder barely a meter away from me and was happy to pose. However my camera was not readily at hand and despite some impressive ninja skills to retrieve it this single frame was all I managed to capture. Hopefully though the coming weeks are going to present ample opportunities when perhaps I’ll be slightly better prepared. Again I’m presuming that this pair are nesting in the scrub behind our house as to see them in this manner is very unusual. Typically we get a large flock passing through in the early morning or late evening but never at such regular intervals as this.

Perhaps even better though was the brief appearance of two male Greenfinches. Now I agree that probably doesn’t sound a particularly interesting occurrence but around here they are as rare as hens teeth. I mentioned back in January that our local flock seemed to have disappeared and fearing they had fallen victim to Trichomonas instigated a full clean of all our feeders. Hopefully this sighting is a sign that Greenfinches are once again moving back into our area and I couldn’t have hoped for a better species to move my Patchwork Challenge total on another notch.

40 Species / 41 Points